The Cursed (League of the Black Swan) (32 page)

He capped a glass vial and shook it vigorously and then placed it upright in a wooden holder. The silver liquid inside bubbled and frothed, sparkling in the sunlight.

“Done,” he said, and she could see the satisfaction on his face. “This should be exactly what she needs to remove any remaining traces of the Grendel poison from her system, for now and for always. I’m also pretty sure that she’ll have no residual effects from it.”

Rio heaved an enormous sigh of relief. “That’s wonderful news. She’s so lucky that you’re the one Merelith called.”

But then she slowly lowered her coffee cup to the table as a horrible thought occurred to her. “You don’t think that was all part of the master plot, do you? The League would contact you because you would know how to deal with poison if it happened to Elisabeth?”

Luke narrowed his eyes, but then he shook his head. “No, I don’t think even the maestro is that devious. I’m pretty sure that Elisabeth’s poisoning was completely accidental and unplanned. Even in its worst days, I’ve never known the League to participate in any way in harming children.”

“Dalriata paid a very high price for his part in what was essentially some kind of twisted business deal,” Rio said, feeling a twinge of unwanted sympathy for the man. He’d been a heartless criminal, but had he deserved to die for his minor role in all of this?

She didn’t know, and she was suddenly glad that life-or-death decisions were not her job. She’d never do well in any kind of government role, because she saw all sides of a matter and could argue convincingly for each. Clarice had always told her she was too softhearted.

“The players in all this are the types who are used to dealing with very high stakes,” Luke said, sounding troubled. “What bothers me about that right now is why they’re all circling you.”

“It must be about my parents. People keep bringing up my birthday,” Rio reminded him.

Luke rubbed a hand over his face, thinking, but then he nodded. “I think you must be right. At first, I wondered if you’d somehow seen something that somebody didn’t want you to see during the course of your job, but that doesn’t really make sense given the circumstances. And of course your birthday wouldn’t matter at all, in that case.”

Rio looked at the potion, mostly in order to be able to quit thinking about herself and all the unsolvable puzzles surrounding her. The vial was only about three-quarters full. Such a tiny amount of liquid to be able to cause such a wonderful effect.

“How long until it’s ready to take to her?”

“A couple of hours. Long enough for the magic to infuse into the potion, but not so long that it begins to lose its efficacy.”

“Should we eat lunch?” It would be better to face the League on a full stomach, after all. A few hours wouldn’t make much difference after all these years.

Luke started laughing. “Have I mentioned how much I like that you’re not one of those women afraid to eat?”

“I never understood that,” she admitted. “You eat, you use your body, and then your muscles need more fuel. It’s really a very efficient process. But I can’t ever say that out loud, because it turns out that not everybody’s metabolism works as well as mine. I’m really pretty lucky, Clarice tells me, and she also offers dire warnings of what will happen to us when we get older and everything slows down. For now, though, I like to eat.”

“Good genes,” Luke said, and then he smacked himself in the forehead with the heel of his hand.

Rio shrugged, but for the first time in a long while she felt a little twinge of pain at the reminder that she didn’t know anything about the
origin
of her genes. Maybe, finally, she was about to find out. There were only two days till her birthday. She had a feeling she was definitely going to learn something then.

They pulled together an easy lunch of fruit and sandwiches, raiding Alice’s groceries with abandon and giving Kit a plate filled with sliced meat, leafy spinach, and strawberries. The little fox had a particular fondness for any fruit with the word
berry
in it, Rio had discovered.

“So. You want to hear about the curse. Are you sure? It’s a pretty ugly story,” Luke said, looking resigned.

He bit into a pickle spear, and Rio felt herself blushing a little as she thought about how he’d used his lovely white teeth when he’d been nibbling on her neck the night before. Luke raised an eyebrow, and then his eyes darkened, as if he’d picked up on what Rio had been thinking.

“If you keep looking at me like that, we won’t be talking,” he said, and his voice had gone low and deep.

Rio glanced at the clock on the wall. “How long did you say we had until the antidote was ready?”

He caught her halfway down the hall and grabbed her and tossed her over his shoulder as if she weighed nothing. She laughed and fought him, and sometime between closing the door behind them and tossing her on his bed, Luke managed to take off his shirt. She let her gaze travel over his beautiful chest, letting it pass over the scars of old battles and linger on the sexy masculine muscles of his chest and abdomen.

“I’ve never seen you go to a gym or work out,” she said. “How do you stay in shape like that?”

He shrugged and then sat down on the bed next to her and became very interested in removing her shirt. “I have good genes, too, at least when it comes to the physical stuff. I also usually do an hour a day of some kind of training, depending on my mood. I was friendly with a martial arts sensei in the 1700s who taught me a great deal.”

She blinked. “It still gets me when you toss out things like that. ‘In the 1700s.’ Like most people would say ‘in the nineties’ or ‘a few months ago.’”

Luke’s face darkened, and she knew the ghosts of his past were haunting him.

“I think we need to finish the conversation we were having, Rio. Let me tell you the rest, and then we don’t ever need to talk about this again, I hope.”

“We don’t need to talk about it at all. I didn’t mean to bring it up. I have my own bad memories that I don’t want to stir up. Please, just forget it.” She tried to pull off her shirt, anything to distract him, but he stopped her and sat on the bed next to her.

“No, I’d rather tell you. I want you to know about me. It feels important that you do,” he said, and she reluctantly nodded.

If he thought it was important, she couldn’t deny him the right to be heard. He already meant too much to her.

“There’s really not all that much of the story that I know. My mother had been involved in poisoning a member of one of the family’s rivals. But this time, it wasn’t the business rival himself; it was the man’s cherished daughter. He was destroyed by it. His wife committed suicide, and his son—the girl’s brother—became a hopeless alcoholic, although we didn’t use that word back then. The family lost everything.”

Rio touched his arm, aching for him, but she said nothing. She didn’t want to interrupt the flow of words. Sometimes it was better to lance the wound and let the infection drain out.

“You realize, of course, that I only heard this third- and fourth-hand from the servants of my adoptive family. The Borgias found me a home, after my mother was forced to deny my existence.” He stared off into the distance, as if watching the horrific scenes from his past play out on a movie screen in his mind.

“It took him years to do it, but before I was ten, the father found what he was looking for. He found a way to deliver a horrible curse, but instead of using it directly against the family who’d cost him everything, he thought that he would take their precious little boy away from them.” Luke laughed, and the sound was so filled with pain and bitterness that Rio shivered and wrapped her arms around him. He stroked her hair while he continued.

“The curse’s exact wording is something I forgot a long time ago, but I can never forget the result. He cursed me to suffer the consequences of my family’s evil. He cursed me to always walk the line between salvation and damnation. He used my blood to seal the magic, and the poor, mad bastard promised me to the forces of darkness.”

Luke laughed a little. “It sounds so overly dramatic today, doesn’t it? He promised the child to the forces of darkness. Sounds like a cheesy horror movie. But everything about it was deadly serious. The only way I could ever keep from becoming soulless and damned would be by constant vigilance. Constant demonstration of my commitment to help others, instead of harm them. To be selfless instead of selfish. In other words, I would survive this life with my soul only if I could become the exact opposite of everything the Borgias represented.”

He pulled her into his lap, embraced her tightly, and rested his cheek on the top of her head. When he began his story again, she could feel the vibrations of his words rumble in his chest, as if the horrible truth had been trapped in his heart and was clawing to break free.

“He wanted to return the pain, didn’t he? A child for a child?” Rio said, shivering. It all made a certain horrible sense, especially when viewed from the twisted perspective of a madman.

“The Borgias didn’t care about me at all, of course,” he said flatly. “My mother had tried to visit me in the early years, but her family forbade it as soon as they caught on. They continued to fund my existence, probably to buy my adoptive family’s silence, but any personal oversight disappeared.”

He laughed, but it was a hideous, grating sound. “I suppose I’m lucky. It would have been easy enough for them to make me disappear, like they usually did with unwanted problems.”

Rio almost couldn’t believe what she was hearing, but she knew it had to be the truth. History was full of powerful dynasties amassing wealth and accomplishment through horrible, ruthless, bloodthirsty means. It made her glad, for just a minute, to be a lowly bike messenger.

Luke was quiet for a while, but she had a few questions. He needed to finish the story, clean out the poison that had infected his soul for so long.

“How did he find you? If they hid you with this adoptive family? How did he know where you were?”

“Bribing servants was easy enough, especially for a man with a personal vendetta. That’s the worst part of it, you see,” Luke said, in a monotone that frightened her a little. Maybe he’d reached and gone beyond the limit of what he could dredge up for one day.

“Luke, wait—”

But he ignored her feeble attempt to stop him.

“The Borgias had needed a way to get the poison into the family, hadn’t they? Only someone the family trusted would have been able to get that close, back in those days.”

Luke’s hands convulsively tightened on Rio’s body, and she had a horrible premonition of what he was going to say next.

“Oh, no,” she whispered.

“Oh, yes. The man who cursed me was my own father and—worse—he knew it.”

Rio held him in her arms until the storm passed. He didn’t weep or sob or scream or cry, although she would have done all of those things. His big body simply shook as if he stood, alone and unprotected, in a gale-force wind, while harsh choking noises ripped up from his throat.

“You’re not alone. You’ll never be alone again,” she said, over and over, while she held him. “I’m here. I promise I’m here.”

He couldn’t cry or wouldn’t cry, but then again he’d had centuries for the tears to have been burned out of him. Rio was only approaching her first quarter century, and she had plenty of tears left. By the time he calmed down, his shoulder and side were soaking wet from her tears.

“Aren’t you ready to run away from me yet?” He took her shoulders and stared into her eyes.

“Never,” she said, trying to smile.

He captured her mouth, then, and kissed her as if he were drowning in her.

“I need you, Rio,” he whispered. “I’ve always needed you, even before I met you.”

“Tell me all about that,” she invited, gently biting his neck and then placing soothing kisses where her teeth had been.

He shuddered and pulled her closer. “Enough talking.”

She agreed wholeheartedly, so she put her arms around his neck and pulled him to her and then raised her head for his kiss, wanting so badly to burn away any remnants of his pain with her touch.

He happily complied, diving into the job with the same dedication he brought to everything in his life. She sighed with relief and pleasure. If kissing was its own form of magic, Luke was a master practitioner. His tongue delved into her mouth, dancing with hers, teasing and taunting and seducing.

Her body yearned toward his. She could feel the heat and delicious anticipation already beginning to build in the form of a flush on her skin and an insistent thrumming ache deep within her. She wanted to touch and taste; she wanted to go slow and revel in the music of the song they created between them. She wanted to make him forget that he’d ever been sad, or abandoned, or cursed.

“I can’t believe you’re here,” Luke admitted, raising himself on one elbow and looking down at her. “You feel like a dream of beauty I once had. When I woke, I was so bereft at the loss that my cheeks were wet from tears.”

The words struck her with the power of a promise, and she cherished them and loved that he’d been so open with her.

“Big, tough wizard crying like a baby,” he said, mocking himself, and she knew he wasn’t only referring to the remembered dream. “Real romantic, right?”

She traced her finger over the curve of his sculpted lips and shushed him. “Maybe the most romantic thing I’ve ever heard.”